
This is an excerpt from the main AMPlay documentation (v2.03).

* 4.8 State:
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Remember Window positions, Position in track, Pause:

These options control what information, over and above the defaults,
is stored in the state files.


  Window Positions: This stores the window position of the main window,
  the mini window, the search window, the Filter Editor window, and the
  Database Editor window. Note that it doesn't store the stack order
  (i.e. what was on top of what)

  Position in track: This remembers how far through the currently
  playing track it is, and on restart will go to that position in the
  track and continue from there.

  Pause status: Remember whether the player was paused when quit.


Stop track before saving state:

This doesn't affect whether the track is stopped when the player is
quit, just the order in which operations are done. If selected, track
playback is stopped before the state save gets to a point that might
take a second or two. With it off, track playback continues until the
save state has completed.


Keep a backup of state files:

The state is stored in choices:audio.mp3.amplay2.db_xyz, where xyz is
the state format version. If this option is enabled, a backup directory
is created below that. When AMPlay comes to save its state, it knows
what files it is about to overwrite, and copies then into the backup
directory before doing so.

If the state files are corrupted (e.g. by running out of disk space
during a save), this allows recovery to the last successfully saved
state.


Restart if running at shutdown.

If set, then if AMPlay is running when you shutdown RISC OS, it writes
an obey file into the choices system such that it is restarted when
RISC OS starts up. It then deletes the file.

It does not write the file if it is exitted manually before shutting
down RISC OS.

Don't use this if you are running AMPlay on startup anyway.


Use RAMDisc for temp files during load/save:

This option can be used to considerably improve startup and shutdown
times when using a saved state. What it does is to copy the state
files into a RAMDisc before parsing them. If a RAMDisc already
exists, it will use that, and make no changes to it (or leave files
behind in it). If there is no RAMDisc, it will create one, use it, and
delete it when finished.

The RAMDisc is only used during startup and shutdown of the player.

The only circumstances in which this might cause problems are;

- RAMDisc already exists, but either too small or too full to contain
  the state files.

- Insufficient memory to contain the state files (in which case
  you'd probably have trouble even with the option turned off).

The state files are copied as needed into the ram disk, and deleted
once read, so the ram disk only needs to have enough space to contain
the largest single file. When creating a ram disk, AMPlay looks at
the maximum possible file size (the statelist) based on the maxfiles
setting, and rounds that up to the nearest Mb.

This option is of most benefit on machines with disk subsystems that
are quite slow compared to the processor speed (e.g. built in IDE in a
StrongARM RiscPC). On systems with fast disks (e.g. Iyonix and probably
VirtualRPC), the benefit is much less, but still detectable with large
databases (below around 5000 tracks, it doesn't make much difference).

________________________________________________________________________
Copyright  2008 Mike Sandells, mike@mikejs.com
Last Modified: 30.05.2008